We’ll be going to Gameforce in Antwerpen 4 and 5 october. We’ll be running Projectorgames and of course promote Fortresscraft evolved.
Thanks to Thorworks for inviting us, and of course to the people at Gameforce for making it possible.

Lets start with the bad first: Bullet Crave and RPGM are both in the freezer, because as much as we love our pet projects, we think some other projects have a bigger chance at success.

The good news: we’ ve got new clients, new projects and a LOAD of work, and unfortunatly it’ s all under NDA, except Fortress Craft, and now comes the good news:

We have moved from our inhouse engines onto Unity, which means faster development, and more wasted CPU cycles. We might not be working at the bleeding edge of what a GPU can do anymore, but the team can now work faster and produce more content than before.

The reasons we moved to Unity:

Microsoft dropped XNA support. It was an awesome platform but without support from Microsoft it will probably die… so we moved on as most Indie Devs tend to do, instead of clinging to a potentially sinking ship.

Expect some new news around November. Untill then Govert will of course go to the yearly Blender Conference.

Warning: this post is just a list of tips and guidelines for starting one’s own company and the way we went about it, as usual your mileage might vary. And as I’m just writing this from the top of my head thus this post will go all over the place. For in-depth articles you’re welcome to glean the sources at the end of the post.

In the Netherlands starting a company is pretty easy: register yourself at the chambre of commerce (kamer van koophandel), choose the type of company you want to be (BV, VOF, eenmanszaak) and then troll the revenue services for a VAT number. Afther that you’re all set to go… Piece of advice, don’t do this before there’s an actual need to, like you’re about to sell the game or when investors start showing up or you’re actually making costs that need to be declared. Also do get an accountant as soon as cash starts moving, they are well worth the money if it saves you hundreds of hours trying to do it yourself

At some point we’d advise you to get a legal aid insurance, this doesn’t cost too much, and should you accidentally write skynet you’ll be able to defend yourself legally before the robots come to get you. This is especially important when you start signing contracts.

Get yourself some backup systems, we chose to use SVN because that was available at the time, at this point GIT might be a better idea because it’s new and shiny. But be sure to keep your backup system in a different physical location than your work computer! You don’t want to lose years of work due to a fire burning down both your computer and your backup.

Keep financial records dutifully in a spreadsheet, and update it ASAP, not at the end of the year (trust me, it gets ugly pretty fast). Be consistent in this for your (future) accountant.

Naturally, the biggest question is how to handle the Money and lack thereof. There are plenty of options:

Start from your mom’s basement: This works fine but you should really leave it after a year, if only for health reasons.

Start with investors: We have no experience with this as we took another route. Our research in the matter however suggests investors and game companies don’t mix very well as the high-hopes of investors don’t match the realities of making games. Basically, you end up selling a large part of your company before you’ve even made it worth something. And if that’s a controlling interest, you may end up not calling the shots. One tale of caution about investors: they can, and usually will, kill a game company. Horror stories galore on the interwebz.

Find business coaching and other university instances (there are plenty ones out there) that help people set up companies and let them help. They might give you a loan to start your company and enable you to leave your mum’s basement. This is currently a good option but you’ll have to be able to make up your own mind when their advice doesn’t match with the weird industry that is the indie industry. And they usually have very strict repayment demands on loans that can be problematic to meet if your company flops.

What we actually ended up doing was something different: Catnip Games started out as a part-time project – we kept normal wage-paying jobs for half the week and spent the other half working on projects. The normal jobs are dialled down when the company earns enough to compensate for lost income. This means you can’t fully focus on creating stuff, but it also means you don’t have to fear paying your rent next month. If the company flops then no harm done and we can move on without debts. If it works, we can ease into full-time self-employment almost immediately.

The best way to describe our development process we have found so far is to compare making games to writing a novel: it takes a long time to write, you can’t know if you have a best-seller until you start marketing it, and a complete flop or a huge success are always on the table, thus people “risking the bank” on investing in game development usually have to be made aware there is no guarantee whatsoever you’ll make any returns on your first game… but if they’re fine with losing money in the short run and make a buck in the future that’s up to them (and you).

Making a game is a R&D process, some solutions might be found in a day, but unforeseen issues might set you back weeks, experience is definitively something acquired on the job, even if you think you know everything. In building a game will you encounter weird unexpected issues and have to fix them, or find it’s unfixable without too much hassle and force you to start from scratch*.

This is usually the part where investors start giving “advice”. You can guess how much help that advice will be when coming from a financial analyst trying to comprehend why the physics engine has bugs in your new platformer/rts/shooter game.

Regarding subsidies: we currently haven’t found any that matched our criteria for a healthy indy dev studio, as subsidies are usually applicable to salaries and a starting indie game company can’t afford employees. Other subsidies are available but will take you up to two weeks in a month of filing papers instead of making games. If you think it’s worth it be my guest, we didn’t. Most subsidies requirements mean you are only eligible for them when you no longer need them in the first place.

If your business takes off you might have to face other problems like managing a team, managing business contacts, going to network events, game days, and other events where like-minded people hang out. But those are luxury problems.

Well hope you enjoyed a piece of mind, for more concise information there are always these sources of in depth information:

That’s it, we put Bullet Crave on Ulule to see if crowdfunding would work, here is the link.

We ended up choosing for Ulule instead of Indiegogo, since Ulule is aimed at Europe and has some successful game projects that fit more with Bullet Crave. Kickstarter is ofcourse the biggest site, but is only for Americans.

We’re still working on several projects (same ol’ same ol’) but one of our “old projects” might get resurrected:

After seeing the wildly successful crowd-funding project we thought “what the hell?” and thought Bullet Crave would be worth giving this a go.

So we looked into all the things that are needed for a successful funding for a project like this, and are probably going to put it on one of the crowd funding websites like indiegogo.com. As usual Rome wasn’t built in a day and all this social media stuff needs to be aligned and ready before we put our project forward. And as we’d like this to work out well it’s going to need a bit of spit’n’polish before we dive into it. Building the webpage and other details and looking where we can put the demo (yes we have one!) and making sure people get the right idea from the onset.

Currently we’re thinking of using the crowdfunding for the remaining development and then releasing the game for free afterwards. If there are enough people interested then we will upgrade the technology (currently 2D) to 3D and add lots of eye candy (as much as the funding allows). Our hope is to do away with DRM and copyright infringement by making the game freely available and being funded by our fans.

Our current developer experience with FortressCraft and other projects is that really-really good game ideas and feedback often come from the community, and it would be practical to streamline community feedback in a system that benefits developers and community alike.

The basis of this (hopefully open) system is to give people the right to vote with their wallet during the whole lifetime of a game. This means they can choose which parts of the game to fund, and developers can directly see which parts the players would like to see in the game.

As this is still at the level of an idea, everything you see here is what we are going to do _unless_it_is_stupid.

In one sentence:

A System for community driven development and funding of games.

The targets are:

for the community to be able to fund a game during and after its development

to enable Developers to live off their work

a transparent system for people to voice their opinion about a game

a way to make games that can evolve continually instead of having to split them into “sequels” or other “addons”

having a content management system for games where everybody can contribute and access game elements

We got some questions from Johannes about the status on RPGM, well the good news is, it’s still being developped, the bad news is, because we have lots of other projects it goes slowly.

But instead of yapping about it I could just give you some screenshots and some explanations, mmm’kay?

Mainscreen:

RPGM

The display engine has been binned for a better one, the tiling has been reworked to look nicer (from hexes to round-ish), some vegetation has been rerendered, roads have been made, cities added (with tavern, keep…), dungeon entrances and ruins added, the city names now show up in nice colored ribbons, oh my!

Party Screen

RPGM

The stats have been implemented, leveling and other shit-fu is working

Fighting works!

RPGM

And suddenly, rabbits!

Dungeons and taverns and other inside places

RPGM

The interior settings now work, walking around a dungeon and the lot. The first quests have been completed.

Of course there are lots of other stuff big and small, just mentioning a few nice things:
– chat between players works (ish).
– we’ve had 1 generated world with only elephants and frogs surviving, thank you emergent behaviour for killing off the other 36 species in the world creation fase.
– the farther you go from civilisation, the bigger the critters get, and the more chance you have of an encounter